Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,9
by clashing cymbals and blowing horns, it’s nice to occasionally find yourself with an oboe. Cool, cavernous, and resonant as a concert hall, Cassowary was a place where I could sit in peace and listen to the music of my own thoughts, free from the aural warscape of home, where I used to sneak off and climb on the roof of the stable to try to obtain some relief.
I’d sit with my arms wrapped around my legs, my forehead pressed against my knees, ocean breeze skimming the top of my head, and I’d empty out my brain, pour out the contents in one smooth flush as effortlessly as if I were tipping over a basin of water. Not thinking can bring its own pleasures, but it could cost you your life if Ma suspected even for a second that your insides weren’t rumbling away like the neighboring Atlantic on a stormy day.
Cassowary presented its own difficulties, but at least they were peacetime challenges. And unlike Ma, who could go from love to hate to indifference before brushing her teeth in the morning, the Falcon was consistent in the ways he was impossible to get along with. Still, I suspected that he liked me, though perhaps not very much, liked me in a vague, unloving sort of way—for one thing, we both shared a deep and abiding devotion to Cassowary. It was a quiet bond between us that even he understood and welcomed.
Ma made it pretty clear that the only reason the Falcon took notice of me was to annoy her, while Pop figured he was out to manipulate and subdue the magnificent Flanagan spirit, “spattering paint on the Mona Lisa,” he called it. In their combined view, Bingo was a tiger, primeval and exotic, a beautiful savage hovering way beyond the Falcon’s corrupting influence, while I was a less glamorous, more pliable species—something that liked to dig, an armadillo, maybe, something that could be housebroken.
Uncle Tom had various theories as to why the Falcon demonstrated an interest in me; one had to do with his bird preoccupation.
“Let’s see: Life gave you wings, but you can’t fly. What kind of a bird is built for running?” He stared at me. “Did you know that the ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain? Hmmn . . . Your grandfather told me when you were born, he thought you had tiny eyes. Well, say, that’s not good. He had you pegged as an imbecile from the get-go.”
Who knows? I had enough trouble trying to understand my own crazy feelings, let alone achieve any real insight into what my grandfather thought. Why did the Falcon persist in involving himself with people who appeared to hold him in contempt? Maybe it was simply the desire for connection, the yearning for family, that drove him, and he couldn’t overcome the outlandish tics of personality that prevented him from achieving his explicit longings.
One thing is certain. It was easier for him to declare his intention to take over the world than it was for him to ask me to join him on his morning ride before breakfast, though he never enjoyed riding alone.
And then there was Ma’s epic distaste for both of us that forged an unspoken, if creaky, alliance. Being mutually despised wasn’t much, but it was something, and it had the good effect of making me think that maybe Ma was the one with the problem.
No matter how anyone looked at it, I wasn’t exactly Ma’s cup of tea. Her distaste for me constituted a kind of psychic birthmark, a port wine stain that resisted fading. On the few occasions that she felt constrained to give me a hug, it was less a soft show of maternal tenderness and more a memorable lesson in force physics, like tripping and falling face-first onto an ice rink, her affection wounding as a cold, blunt object.
In the first hours and days after my birth, she tried to convince everyone that I was suffering from Down syndrome and needed to be institutionalized, pointing to my vaguely almond-shaped eyes as proof, the baffled doctors concluding she was suffering from a hormonal balance. Ma never would say die—all the time I was growing up, she continued to refer to the “Oriental cast” of my eyes as evidence there was something wrong with me.
Pop used to argue with her, armed with his own hyperbolic skill set: “Anais! The boy’s a genius. Look at his school marks! Right off the charts—and what about